New Miss France insists she’s feminist after criticism

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Issued on: 12/12/2021 – 16:56 Modified: 12/12/2021 – 16:54

Caen (France) (AFP) – The new Miss France 2022 insisted she was a feminist after winning this year’s competition, which drew criticism from the government’s Gender Equality Minister.

“As a woman, I wanted to show that you can be Miss France and a feminist,” Diane Leyre, a real estate professional from the Paris region, said at a press conference on Saturday evening.

“For me, being a feminist is deciding what I want.”

The Miss France pageant and other beauty pageants around the world have long been criticized by women’s rights groups as objectifying women and promoting unhealthy body images.

The opposition was led this year by the French Minister for Equality between Women and Men, Elisabeth Moreno, who denounced the “obsolete rules of the competition … which can be discriminatory”.

Applicants must be single, over one meter 70 centimeters (five feet six inches) and be under the age of 25, although organizers said on Saturday that the requirement to be single will change “to bring us in tune with the time”.

Possibly including transgender participants “is part of our discussions,” the head of the Miss France company, Alexia Laroche-Joubert, told radio Europe 1 on Saturday.

More than seven million people, or about one in seven French adults, watched this year’s competition on Saturday night on TF1, which was filmed in a stadium in the northeast of the capital.

“We all need a little lightness,” Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot told BFM on Friday, defending the candidates she described as “far from being empty trophies”.

© 2021 AFP

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